Scott McClellan deserves to be remembered, not as the greatest but as one of the most effective stooge figures in the Bush Administration. (The greatest: Alberto Gonzalez.) This week's news from his publisher--that the stooge says he had unknowingly passed along false information provided to him by Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, Andrew Card, "and the president himself"--would seem to suggest that McClellan may be waking up a bit to what his actual role was during the three years he served as White House press secretary.
But I wouldn't count on this awareness reaching very far. In fact, by seizing on a case where an outright falsehood was passed along to the press, we may overlook the meaning of McClellan's tenure as the jerk at the podium, which is what I called him in my April, 2006 retrospective. You can read that post for the full interpretation; here's the gist of what I want you to appreciate about McClellan, because it's worse than lying.
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I will tell you: they were a constraint being made more absent with every exchange they had with the thick-headed and graceless McClellan. In this sense they were part of the Terror Presidency. The agenda was not to get the White House message out; it was not to explain the president's policies. At both of these (common sense) tasks McClellan was simply awful, his performance a non-starter. No, he was part of something larger and far more disturbing; and it would have been disturbing even to loyal Republicans if they had bothered to understand it.
The goal, I think, was to make the American presidency more opaque, so that no one could see in. No self-respecting man would take that job aware of what he was going to be asked to do. McClellan was unaware. He remains so. But he's not the only one.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20071124/cm_huffpost/073896
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